Paranoia

The madness that makes history

Luigi Zoja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317202387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

Luigi Zoja presents an insightful analysis of the use and misuse of paranoia throughout history and in contemporary society. Zoja combines history with depth psychology, contemporary politics and tragic literature, resulting in a clear and balanced analysis presented with rare clarity. The devastating impact of paranoia on societies is explored in detail.

Focusing on the contagious aspects of paranoia and its infectious, self-replicating dynamics, Zoja takes such diverse examples as Ajax and George W. Bush, Cain and the American Holocaust, Hitler, Stalin and Othello to illustrate his argument. He reconstructs the emblematic arguments that paranoia has promoted in Western history and examines how the power of the modern media and mass communication has affected how it spreads. Paranoia clearly examines how leaders lose control of their influence, how the collective unconscious acquires an autonomous life and how seductive its effects can be – more so than any political, religious or ideological discourse.

This gripping study will be essential reading for depth and analytical psychologists, and academics and students of history, cultural studies, psychology, classical studies, literary studies, anthropology and sociology.

1

WHAT IS PARANOIA?

Individual (clinical) paranoia

The careful consideration of psychic factors is of importance in restoring not merely the individual’s balance, but society’s as well; otherwise the destructive tendencies easily gain the upper hand.¹

There may not actually be an enemy! […] It is not the enemy that is essential to war and that forces wars upon us, but the imagination.²

The word paranoia comes from ancient Greek: nóos means ‘thought’; para- means ‘going beyond’. In theory, the term simply denotes a mind that goes beyond the usual field of thought.³ In practice, however, even in ancient Greek it indicated a delusional manner of thinking. But the concept was not as well known as it is today. It was nineteenth-century German psychiatry that brought it into modern discourse.

In politics the word paranoia is often used to criticize an opponent, though probably few of the people who use it could actually explain what it means. Only rarely has the term been used self-critically. It was sometimes used in that way in Italy in 1968, during student debates. When things were getting out of hand, the cry would sometimes go up: ‘Compagni, non andiamo in paranoia’ (Comrades, let’s not lapse into paranoia!). The exhortation did not always restore order, but with its hint of self-criticism it spread a veil of harmony over proceedings. Yet nobody ever shouted back: ‘Comrade, what does paranoia actually mean?’

Definitions

Psychopathology has classified this disorder in a fairly uniform way. The following are some of the best known formulas.

According to the American Heritage Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, paranoia is:

1.a psychotic disorder characterized by systematized delusions, especially of persecution or grandeur, in the absence of other personality disorders;

2.an extreme, irrational distrust of others.⁴

Another important American work stresses that ‘In paranoia the delusional system is well systematized and logical.’⁵

Bleuler’s Textbook states that

outside of the delusional system and everything that refers to it, [the paranoiac’s] logic and train of ideas are sound according to our means of investigation. […] The diagnosis of paranoia is not always at all easy in practice. The patients know which of their ideas are considered morbid by others and can conceal or weaken them so that they can be defended.⁶

According to another classic treatise, that of Jaspers,

[The paranoiac’s] complete power of differentiation, severe criticism, and excellent capacity for thought do not prevent him from being convinced of his delusional ideas. […] He does not lack the power of differentiation necessary to distinguish between the different sources of our knowledge but he invokes his source, be it supernatural or natural.⁷

French psychiatry uses similar terms: ‘This type of delusional personality is characterized by the clarity and order of its psychic life, […] and by the systematic and ‘reasoning’ structure of the delusional imagination.’⁸

Unfortunately paranoia is the ‘Cinderella of psychiatry’, according to another textbook, which goes on: ‘Since the paranoiac is motivated solely by a desire to confirm all of his suspicions, his intellective capacities, which are usually normal or above normal, cannot be taken as a guarantee of good, realistic judgements.’⁹

Already in 1895 – even before he had founded psychoanalysis – Freud defined paranoia as

[1]‌ […] the misuse of a psychic mechanism which is very commonly employed in normal life: the mechanism of transposition or projection.

Every time an internal change takes place, we are given the choice of attributing it either to an internal cause or to an external one. If something keeps us from accepting the internal origin, we naturally seize on an external one. In the second place, we are accustomed to seeing that our internal states are noticed by other people (from the mimic expression of feelings). This gives rise to the normal delusion of attention and to normal projection. These are all normal things as long as we preserve an awareness of our internal change. But if we forget about that and are only left with the part of the syllogism that leads outwards, then we have paranoia, with its overestimation of what people know about us and what people have done to us. What do people know about us which we ourselves do not know and cannot admit? This is a misuse of the mechanism of projection for the purposes of defence.¹⁰

Each definition, deriving from very different schools of psychiatry, sends us back, as remorselessly as paranoia itself, to the oldest one, which the French were already using in the early nineteenth century: folie raisonnante or folie lucide. Every discussion of paranoia reminds us that the condition belongs to two systems of thought simultaneously: that of reason and that of delusion. Paranoia is infinitely more difficult to identify than other mental disorders because it is able to disguise itself, both within the personality of the paranoiac, who as a whole is far from mad, and among the individuals around him. What we see is the tip of an iceberg of unreason on which any ship of reason can founder.

Mental disorders are not solid blocks of madness. They are, rather, ‘delusional styles’ which range, in infinite gradations, from normality to madness. This contiguity, however, is particularly worrying in paranoia. Not only does it not oppose reason; it pretends to cooperate with reason. Between mentally ill and sane people there is no leap, but continuity. But even in the madman’s mind, thought usually slides from ‘normality’ into delusion only by degrees, and this transition can be particularly imperceptible in the paranoiac. The observer often thinks he is in a comforting safety zone when in reality that is not the case.

More than any other mental disorder, paranoia seems not to be ascribable to organic causes. This means on the one hand that organic treatment is unlikely to be effective, and on the other that its origin, being psychological, is very hard to identify, for each psychic life is variable just as each individual existence is different from all others.

Lastly, paranoia manifests itself later than other mental disorders. The paranoiac, being fragile, if he is unable to face a vital problem, moves it away in time. For as long as he can, he slides it forward, into the future. When he should finally accept that his life is not going to change, he pushes his disorder outwards, inventing obstacles and hostilities or blowing them up out of all proportion. Often, therefore, paranoia manifests itself only at the age of forty or more: in people with a career, who may show some signs of suspiciousness, which however are generally looked upon positively as useful caution. What is wrong with a middle-aged insurance agent being able to give us a detailed list of the risks we run? Or with a doctor with years of experience fearing invisible diseases and recommending that we have a long series of tests done? Their mistrust does not strike us as pathological thought, but as a form of professionalism. Their paranoia is integrated into life.

Grandmother’s coffee pot

In some cases the deformation of thought manifests itself particularly late in life. An example is provided by an elderly woman.

A forty-year-old woman, with plenty of problems of her own, looked after her grandmother affectionately. Her grandmother was a widow, lived in a remote village and over time tended to cut herself off. To ensure that she had daily assistance, her granddaughter would visit her and arrange for girls to live with her. But as soon as the granddaughter returned to the city, each girl, however well-meaning, would fall foul of the old woman’s mistrust.

Trying to create a relationship, and also to break the silence of that tiny, isolated flat in the hills, the girl would see an espresso coffee pot in the dresser and say, ‘What a lovely coffee pot!’ The grandmother would start to get suspicious: she likes that coffee pot too much; she might steal it. So she would hide it. A few days would pass. Finally the grandmother would fancy a coffee. And being set in her ways, like all old people, she would look for the coffee pot in the dresser; the paranoid trait in the grandmother’s temperament was secondary and sporadic, but her being suspicious and hiding the coffee pot were also recent and unimportant events, the kind that are most easily forgotten by old people. At this point, however, the paranoid personality would reappear, finding confirmations in the very conditions that she herself had created. ‘The coffee pot has gone: therefore it has been stolen.’

In a sense, there had indeed been a theft: the coffee pot had been taken away by the ‘dishonest’ part of the grandmother, the part that mainly deceived itself. But she, being unaware of this component of her personality, refused to listen to reason: the granddaughter must find her another girl, because this one was a thief.

Hypotheses about causes

Psychiatry supposes that most people who slip into paranoia are apparently well adjusted but internally fragile. Their fragility may be the result of an early childhood characterized by emotional coldness or conflict: we will come across both of these elements in the lives of Hitler and Stalin. Many individuals would react to such sufferings in a compensatory manner, developing cold, rigid mental processes of formal logic, often detached from reality.

According to Melanie Klein, during the first year of life the mind moves from a schizo-paranoid position to a depressive one. Whereas in the early months it expresses anger or cries quite freely, towards the second half of the year the child begins to restrain itself. This theory says that the child stops projecting all its aggression: it turns part of it back towards itself, internally constructing the basis of the future feelings of guilt – but also of responsibility – which every adult has to cope with. These are, however, psychological positions, not rigidly predetermined phases. That on the one hand means that this evolution (the transition to the depressive position) may not be successful. On the other hand, the idea of positions is similar to that of archetypes, on which we are basing ourselves: they are not phases that one gets over in an absolute sense, but psychological potentials to which particular situations may lead back, even in the adult. As far as our theme is concerned, violent circumstances, similar to those that were intolerable in early childhood, can reactivate schizo-paranoid attitudes. When that happens, the individual becomes aggressive, and, since he has difficulty in taking responsibility personally, he projects all evil on to others.

This theory anticipates the theme that we will continue to come across: a paranoid potential is present in every ordinary person, in every phase of their existence, in whatever society they find themselves.¹¹ And the environment has the power to ignite it. It is precisely this danger that is the subject of this book: ‘Monsters do exist, but they are too few to be really dangerous; ordinary people are more dangerous.’¹²

The ubiquity of paranoia

We generally feel mental illnesses to be something different and alarming. Towards those who suffer from them we may feel compassion, but also difference and mistrust. By contrast, on our first encounter with paranoia, we may feel it to be a continuation of our normal way of thinking – more precisely, of our need for explanations. Paranoia, in a diluted form, is bought and sold every day, in the street, not in psychiatric institutions. It is not an absolutely different way of thinking. Every typical mental process is potentially present in us. The temptation to reject our responsibilities and attribute evil to others is no exception. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• The madness of Ajax
• 1 What is paranoia?: Individual (clinical) paranoia
• 2 The beginnings: Myth and history
• 3 European nationalism: From cultural renaissance to paranoia
• 4 Naive persecutors
• 5 Darkness over Europe
• 6 Freud, Keynes and the bamboozled man
• 7 Siegfried
• 8 The granite foundation and the hour of idiocy
• 9 The man of steel and the final product
• 10 Fire that feeds fire
• 11 Further and further west
• 12 A plan for the twenty-first century?
• 13 Inconclusive thoughts
• Iago’s whisper
• Bibliography
• Index